The Chronicles of the Red Queen 1: Belonging to the Black
by Makilome
Summary: First story of a series. Dwayne/Willow/Paul. Everything changes when fate brings Willow Rosenberg to Santa Carla in 1987 and a rift occurs by saving the Boys. Forced to leave their time and even their dimension, two very different Lost Boys fall in love with the Red Queen of their hearts for very different reasons. Who will she choose, or will she choose at all?


**The Annals of the Red Queen**

The First Tale: Belonging to the Black

Everything changes when fate brings Willow Rosenberg to Santa Carla, 1987 just as a war of Biblical proportions threatened the multi-verse. Stopping the murder of the Lost Boys creates a rift in the timeline that forces them to leave with her to keep paradox from destroying creation. The life dept each of them owe her gives her unlooked for allies, so she plays her hand, offering the Boys a deal to either join their gifts to the Champions of the Hellmouth in their darkest hour, or to be chipped and unable to ever hunt for the human blood they needed to keep their strength. Attracted by the deceptively angelic bearing paired with the awesome power of a Dark Goddess,Paul stays and becomes infatuated while his brother Dwayne sees his chance to be something more and end a meaningless existance of the constant party that had long ago lost its appeal and feels the irresistable pull that means only one thing, the lovely, selfless, and darkly powerful red head is his destined mate. This is my first one shot and the beginning of a series.

She danced upon the lines

the thin strips between the light and the penetrating shadow

between the heat of her passians and crippling cold

between madness and the selflessness of a tainted soul

a dance of death that all consuming blazed a moment greater than life.

Fate chose partners who could reel back a beauty made for the Night.

Men who could see past haunted eyes and robbed innocence.

Another Child of the Black drowning in the pool of her sins

in the blood of her slain choking upon her unjust ends

who can only be saved by those who embodied her fall from the light

-excerpt from Belonging to the Black by Makilome

Paul

If anyone were to look at them side by side, they would never have said that they were anything alike. He was the very image of the Bad Boy, oozing the sins of the flesh out of his very pores and drawing out his unlucky prey with a success that sometimes even boggled his mind! And she was the image of innocence, of all things that were good, that were wholesome, untainted and unstained. The picture of everything that was right with the world. But they would be mistaken, completely and utterly. Inside her soul was a darkness, a lurking evil so great that it could consume the entirety of the world in the blaze of grief, of hatred, of a thousand horrors she had been forced to endure far too young and far to fast. It was an evil that he understood, that had formed and crafted him, that drew him in like a honing beacon at sea and held him paralyzed like the singing sirens of Greek myth. From the moment he first laid his eyes on Willow Rosenberg, Paul's notorious wandering eye all but dissapeared. The fire of his desire only raged now for the embodiment of raw, wild, untamed and uncontrollable power that she was.

Coming from a world and a time far different from his own, she came into their lives in a whirlwind. Her sudden appearance in their home waking them all, and saving them from the self styled Hunters who had read far to many comic books and sought to start their superhero career by acting as a stake in the dark against those who were not concious and unaware of how close they had come to breathing their last. She acted at the time to save the Froggs and the backstabbing Star and her spellbound paramour Michael from starting a war from which they would never emerge out of alive. Her actions had deeply angered the Powers that reigned over the multi-verse. Apparently, they had been fated and meant to die. Their continued survival affected the world they ran in to such a point that her actions created a paradox that could have spelled the end to everything as they knew it. In order to stop the world from spiralling into non existance they were given but one single option. They had to leave their world, their time, their very dimension from the hellish home from which their unexpected savior hailed.

The debt that each of them now owed her was profound. For vampires and witches alike only death could pay for life, and now they were bound to her. Even now he couldn't understand why she had made the deal that she had with them. She held a power over them that she could use however she felt like. She could weild them as her own personal assasins, hold over their heads forever the price for saving their lives and their world. Yet Willow chose to use them for a far different ends. She chose to use her leverage for the good of others instead of serving her own desires. A war the likes of which he had never even heard of or could ever imagine threatened to engulf and destroy everything that the witch had left, which was not much. The hypocritical way her so called friends thought of her angered him for reasons that even now if you asked him he could not tell you why. She spoke to each of them alone after a long argument between her and the blonde and witless Slayer and her pet minions that inspite of deeds committed that could have brought the free world to its knees months before when in grief driven madness she had almost ended the world.

The deal was simple. And she read them all so well, reading the secrets each bound deep inside and never voiced to the others. Even he began to feel the emptiness, the meaninglessness of his immortal life spent in a never ending adolescent party. Even now, sometime after the end of that life, he felt the deadness of his soul the moment she had come, acting on auto piolet and draining himself in cheap achohol and strong weed. She gave them all the only chance they ever had to cast aside that life and to make their lives actually mean something again. The war that cast its profound and terrible evil across the Hellmouth and began leaking out into other parts of the world threatened to make all her efforts to protect human beings mean nothing as they are driven mad by death and chaos that was the Hallmark of the being known as the First Evil. She offered a chance to take up arms against the very thing that formed them and turn from monsters into true though unsung heros, or to take away their ability to willfully harm another human being by placing a chip that would cause horrible pain anytime they sought to hunt and drain a mortal against their will.

It was no idle threat. Unlike any other mortal, she had the power to see through that very thing and they would have next to no means to stop her. The demonstration of her profound power spellbounded him, as well sending the alien emotion of fear to all of his coven. She was breathtakingly beautiful, a intriuging mixture of polar opposites. Her bearing was that of a vulnerable and innocent woman, who looked every inch one of the very few in a corrupted world who remained uncorrupted and unstained. And to an extent, who she had once been was still very much alive. Self depricating and entirely selfless, every action that she took was done to help others and not one time had he ever witnessed her doing anything that would only benefit her alone. But she was also a Dark Goddess, filled with bitter and profound hatred, an all consuming rage that was beyond anything he had ever heard of. When someone threatened those that were placed underneath her care and protection, she would destroy them without qualm and without mercy. It was a secret list of victims kept secret from all the others but the Boys and the lovely and dark Faith who would sometimes join on secret missions and not one time cast judgement on her actions.

Fighting side by side, being witness to both sides of her, he was drawn to her more and more as each day passed. To him she was the perfect addition to their coven, someone groomed to become a vampire, and he had made the decision to slowly draw her back from the light that didn't deserve her and bring her into the fold, bring her to him. He would make sure she never fell to far, and he would make sure that she never had to know the profound pain and utter lonliness that sent her off the deep end ever again! He would have never thought he would be attracted to a woman like her before, always drawn towards the blazing artifical beauty of the blonde bimbos of his seaside home like Buffy who were looking for love in all the wrong places. And yet, here he was, staring at her angelic image in a white cotton dress that reached her ankles that were bound in silver gladiator style sandles and cascading waves of blood red hair that shined in the light, not even noticing other than the slight annoyance the other women desperately trying to get his attention.

It did not bother him at all, that her killing spree and the darkest parts of her soul that long had been burried had been brought forth at the death of her female lover. If anything it enticed him, providing a challenge and fueling many a day time dream as he lay sleeping in her basement. And he was not the only one who had been captured by her. His competition took on the forms of the persistant, annoying, and far to cocky Kennedy who didn't seem capeable of taking a hint and to stop seeking to take what was not hers. She was to controlling and jealous with next to no control over her volatile teenage emotions for Willow and she had tried numerous times to get the brunette to back off with no success. If her constant persuit and cornering of an unwilling red head that fought against the urge to flay her did not come to a stop soon, he would not be responsible for his actions! From the moment she reversed their fate, whether she realized it or not, she had been marked out as one of their own, and not one single Lost Boy would ever allow for anyone outside of them to have her. She was theirs just as much as they were hers, it was simply a matter of time before she began her initiation.

His other rival was in the form of his brother Dwayne. Always the quiet and thoughtful one, he recongnized her genious and engaged her in deep conversations that went beyond the comprehension of anyone outside the two of them. She had brought him back to life, their old life taking the greatest toll on him in its meaninglessness and its never ending drollness. He knew that she was the real reason his brother fought, and from the time she had told her terrible tale, she had given back to him something that had died in the heart of his brother long before he had ever came along and drunk from the bottle containing their Maker's blood, hope! She had reached back into time and space and gave the moment he was turned meaning and purpose! She had fallen so far from grace that none of them, not even David could reach the levels of darkness that tormented her each moment, and yet she still had fought tooth and nail her way back to some semblance of the woman she had been before. If she found a way out of the Abyss, then perhaps Dwayne could also find a way. And every night that passed deepend the feelings he had for her.

Loathe as he was to admit it, he was not oblivious to the affect his brother had on the witch. The others did not notice, but Paul knew that the feelings were not one-sided, and her feelings were lessed confused and he could feel the want from both sides. If he wanted her, he had but two options. He had to reach out and fight for the woman that now consumed his thoughts and ignited a long, smoldering and burning lust for all that she was, or to reach out in a different way and be open to sharing her.

Dwayne's POV

He felt his brother's eyes on them even as he and Willow discussed their next move. They had been arguing for a long while now. He cared far to much for the red haired beauty to allow her to go into danger to retrieve the weapon her Goddess had showed her alone and unaided. Just because she had within her birdlike frame god like power did not make her invulnerable or immortal. He was troubled constantly of the things that could happen when he was not there at her side to help her fight against the darkness that sought her out with it's unclean fingers to wrap her back into the Hell she had fought so hard to come out of! He would never be able to repay her for what she had done for him, for all of them! An accident that seemed more and more like fate as the days went by that sent her at the deciding moment for his coven between life and death. Her selfless act and her sacrafice did have benefits for her and the Champions that battled year after year over the Hellmouth, but she acted out of compassion when she gave them back their meaning and purpose.

Not long after the Powers in effort to repair the rift she created sent them with her into this baffling future that still left him dazzled and half maddened he found just how much they were truly alike. She was brilliant, her mind was filled with vast knowledge on everything from the ancient world to modern technology, from religion and quantam physics! Their patrols went far into the night, and they stayed in the cemetery long past the time the others returned to Slayer Central, talking into the small hours of early morning on anything and everything. Around her he had no need for his carefully crafted walls. Everything was laid open and bare, and she did not hide from him even the darkest parts of her tainted soul, showing him even before the others the true form that she embodied now, an eery and ethereal beauty of pale skin that glowed like a pearl and the tiny veins of black that accented her pixie like bone structure and the depths of eyes the color of shining onyx. Not long ago she had told him that he was the only person with whom she felt safe to truly be her real self. There was no judgement, no condemnation, just pure understanding.

When the nightmares became to much, when the weight of the horrors she had been forced to bare closed in around her, she seeked him out instead of the so called friends that she had called her family. Sometimes he would just stand with her, reveling in the feeling of her head on his shoulder and the feeling of her body molding and fitting perfectly into his as he held her, no words passing between them and none being needed. It was becoming harder to hide his feelings for her. The desire she brought out of him was strong, overwhelming, unlike anything any other woman with whom he would spend a moment's passion with ever provoked in him. He dreamed of what it would be like to kiss her, to taste her, to possess her body and soul and to belong to her. To spend an eternity that she alone gave meaning and purpose to with her at his side. He wondered how much she suspected. She was quick on the uptake. But she never noticed how others looked at her. Always living under Buffy's shadow, she never noticed the gazes that followed her form. She was oblivious to how Paul looked at her, and didn't think anyone desired her the way they did Buffy.

His control was slipping, and he had caught himself staring after her form for long moments. Sooner or later, he was going to remove any doubt on how he felt about her. He was nervous for when that moment came and how she would react. He couldn't bare to lose her before he had her. "Look, I can't bare the thought of you out there alone! I know how powerful you are! I respect your power and you know it! But it doesn't make you invincable, and every second you were out there and I don't know where you are or how to reach you would drive me insane! I'm asking you to have a little mercy on me and don't put yourself into undue danger." the small smile that was his alone and the light in her eyes caused his heart to pound in his chest and in his head. He just didn't have words to describe how beautiful she was. He couldn't tear his eyes away. She reached out and touched the side of his face and he leaned in to its warmth and willed himself not to let out a moan or tackle and kiss her senseless before God and everyone! "You really do worry about me don't you?" it broke his heart and angered him that the thought that anyone cared about her saftey had become such a foreign concept to her.

He reached up and took her hand into his and bored his eyes into hers. "Yes! Why wouldn't I care for someone who has done so much for someone who does not deserve your kindness, and don't argue that you are more evil!" his comment made her giggle and it was contagious. "Alright, I won't argue the obvious. I am the only one who can do this Dwayne. It is not an option or a suggestion, we have to have that Scythe! So how do I put you at ease?" and then, a solution that had been staring him in the face the entire time he had been arguing with her dawned on him and he wanted to smack himself for not seeing it before! It would solve his anxiety over her departure and give him a chance, far away from Paul and the others to show her his feelings. "Take me with you. That is how we solve this problem." her eyes lit up all the brighter, and a wider smile spread across her face. He almost choked, for if he was reading this right, it seemed the feelings he bore for her were not one-sided! "Yes, that would work perfectly! It will go faster with two, and I wouldn't have to listen to you when I got back if I got so much as a scratch when away rant and rave into the wee hours." she said teasingly and smacking him lightly in the arm.

He caught the other hand with his left before she could lift it away. "Awe, but you like my ranting, and you LOVE when I growl!" he said playfully, enjoying the very fetching shade of red she turned and wondering how far her blush reached. He hoped he was right, and he would have the chance to find out that delightful fact!


End file.
